


The Guardian

by Alasdair_you



Category: Original Work
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Fantasy, Fluff and Smut, Gods, Hurt/Comfort, M/F relationship, Magic, Original Character(s), Original Universe, Reincarnation, Stasis, angsty, m/m relationship, maybe smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-06 16:49:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16836619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alasdair_you/pseuds/Alasdair_you
Summary: When a child of prophecy was born into a poor farming village, only fate brought him into contact with the artifact and the Guardian of it that called to the magic in his blood, but it was a woman who sealed him into sleep to stop the threat that accompanied his arrival.But fate can't be stopped and destruction only grows hungry for chaos in its absence.By the time Brysan Farrow wakes up, however, it's to a world he no longer recognizes, a woman he can no longer care for, and a new Guardian with enough bitter sass to rival his own.





	The Guardian

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Macaria_Czol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macaria_Czol/gifts).



He hungered. Rabid and ravenous, curled deep down in the dark, he festered in it, aware of little beyond the cavernous, angry pit in his belly and the hatred that fueled him, fed him, filled up the hollow holes that peppered his insides with feral rage that stoked hunger into flames. 

Deep in the dark, long claws raked scores into walls, sparking like steel on stone. He waited, feeding fury with loneliness. It happened like this time and time again.

He raged. He clawed. He rose. He fed. He fell.

But he always came back.

The cycle repeated, vicious and unbending, for a villain in the dark so littered with scars that he was little else but thickened tissue, claws, and livid, horrific anger so focused that it was razor sharp.

He was aware of little beyond the cavernous, angry pit in his belly but he was aware, so avidly obsessed, that the beacon he felt high, high above him, out beyond his damp, wet prison where eyes went to go blind and hearts went to turn to stone, turned his bitter rage into scalpels. That light, that beacon that he couldn't see but he could feel, it taunted him. It held the ground down around him with shining golden hands and raucous laughter he remembered from eons past.

He would cut and cut away until the laughter died. He would crush and burn and slaughter. The claws he had sharpened on stone would peel flesh from bone and he would bury that light so far beneath his own hell that nobody, not the Guardian, not Wielder...

Nobody...

Nobody would ever see it again.

He stretched leathery wings against wet rock, creaking and scraping. He hauled heavy feet upright. He straightened his back. He opened his eyes.

He screamed and far, far above him, the world shuddered with an ancient, inborn fear of everything they'd ever buried in the dark.

\-------------------------------------

Mina was not the sort of girl that frightened easily. By her sixteenth year, she had already faced down the worst of the temple's priests (who so frequently reminded her that she was to be the example of divinity and grace to the population of Celmae, all while disdainfully staring down at her over their beaky noses,) the ruling families of the other four city-states of Nevene, three potential suitors (who had all fled in the night on the verge of wetting their small clothes,) a chronically ill older brother who actually did succeed at being an example of divinity and grace (right down, in fact, to terminal suffering,) the ire of her grandmother (a small but formidable woman whose personality was the size of the palace,) and the untimely (and violent) deaths of both her mother and her father.

So Mina of Celmae, second in line for regency, absolutely did not frighten easily. She was stoic, with a backbone made of steel and a face that gave away so little she had been nicknamed 'the Princess of Stone' by the prince of their neighboring city-state. 

When the very ground beneath her feet trembled, however, she felt the untouched muscle of her heart tremble beneath her ribs as if something had just dipped it into ice water. Momentarily, she thought that something had, perhaps, gone wrong in the armory below the library where she was currently attempting to write yet another letter of rejection to a vapid princess on behalf of Lewis, who was wheezing nearby, barely upright in his chair, his lips that alarming shade of lavendar that they tended to turn when his episodes came on.

He'd been coughing too hard to notice, it seemed. In fact, he hadn't even noticed the scratching of her quill coming to a stop mid-sentence and without a dip into the ink pot again. The black bled out into the parchment, forming a dark blot as Mina stared, poised as still as glass, out the window. Her head turned to one side curiously and her brow furrowed.

Nothing. It had felt so pregnant, as if the world was trembling on the tipping point of some snowy peak, prepared to roll downward into the abyss, jolted by some otherwordly shiver, but nothing immediately happened. Mina grasped the necklace at her throat, a simple stone of pale blue flecked with gold, given to her by her grandmother...an heirloom, she'd been told. Lewis continued coughing, fingers gripped around the handles of his chair, blonde hair damp with sweat, curled around the silver circlet that sat at his brow. It had been a heavy burden to bestow upon a six-year-old, but Lewis had been next in line when their parents died.

It only grew heavier, like it was actively attempting to strangle the life out of him one fit at a time.

"Do we have a legitimate reason for declining Lady Laurelien's proposal for her daughter?" Mina pondered out loud. It was a veiled attempt at shaking the startling feeling that something was terribly wrong from her own shoulders and at distracting her brother from the wet wheezing sound that emanated from his chest with every ragged breath. It, too, would pass, like they all did.

Until, of course, it didn't. Then, Mina surmised, Lewis would suffocate. It was a dark and terrible thought to let slip into her head in that moment, but, realistically, it had always been there. Even in her earliest memories...even in the very first one she could recall (age three, during the harvest festivals, watching their mother wipe blood from Lewis's mouth) he had been in and out of perpetual illness. He coughed so hard that his throat bled, trying desperately to rid his lungs of the thick fluid that collected in them. The healers often put him under tents with boiling vats of vinegar.

To clear the airways, they explained.

To pickle me alive, Lewis had responded viciously.

Her brother, at the tender age of eighteen, heaved another violent cough and shrugged his shoulders, broad like their father's but thin from illness. "Other than I'm dying?"

"You've been dying since we were children. You take forever to do anything. I'm much more efficient," Mina drawled, shooting him a look of clear disapproval. She was not frightened of life after Lewis. It had been an inevitablility since shortly after his birth. Frankly, she thought it was a miracle of some sort that he was still alive nearly twenty years later. 

Lewis laughed through wet sounding wheezes. "Oh, yes, you'd have died three times by now," he agreed theatrically, waving a hand at her in the most dismissive manner he could manage. "Each time more gruesome than the last. Me? I'm likely to drown in my own vomit or suffocate from the gods only know what is growing in my chest."

"Nothing is growing," she pointed out. "Unless you've been eating pumpkin seeds again. You're not meant to. You know they make your throat itch." 

Lewis snorted, which turned quickly into another cough, and Mina was about to add on that perhaps pumpkins really were sprouting in his chest cavity but the shaking that she had forgotten about...the very one that had dipped her heart in frigid water, that she had been so eager to pretend hadn't happened because Lewis hadn't noticed, began again.

Only this time, the tremor didn't stop with the sort of shake that someone might use to wake another person up...as if the universe were giving the world a gentle shake, nudging her from an afternoon nap.

This grew. It grew until the books on the shelves shook free from their cases, until the glass in the windows clapped and raged against the panes holding it in, until fear finally took root in Mina's chest and she turned, blue eyes wild and wide, to Lewis, who was watching the windows like he couldn't quite believe what was happening but it was slowly sinking in, spreading over his features. Mina watched that expression turn from surprise, to fear, to absolute dread and then--

"Get away from the windows," her brother breathed, his words still wet and wheezing. She hesitated, if only because she didn't know how to react...because the ground couldn't shake...because it was solid, it was safety and security. The sea was supposed to shake and tremble and rage in all of its enormous might.

But Celmae was not a sea-faring state. Their patronage was paid to a god of the land. Surely, he wouldn't seek to threaten his own people with such a display of power...surely, this was all some terrible nightmare--

Lewis was up, moving, even before her, even with his lungs bloodied and bruised from the inside out. "Mina, get away from the windows! Now!" His fingers, long and cold and peppered red and white from lack of oxygen, closed around her wrist and Lewis pulled. Sick as he was, he was older. He was taller. He was heavier. 

And he'd saved her life, it seemed, because no sooner had he pulled her halfway across the room, their footsteps weaving on uneven ground as walls trembled, the windows shattered and outside, the very ground beneath the palace seemed to wail as if in pain, like a chorus of damned souls was clawing through, scraping and screaming and--

"Lewis!" 

They burst through the library door to the panicked cry of their grandmother, bedecked in all the finery of her station--emerald green dress torn at the edges from a flight through the quivering halls, silvery hair falling from jeweled pins, chest heaving under the weight of precious stones.

She had never seen her grandmother look so out of order. In fact, Mina looked around, she had never seen this place look so chaotic. People were running through the halls, screaming, praying. 

The ground tipped as if the earth had turned to water and rose up like the waves of the sea. The walls began to buckle and from where they cracked, something poured out.

Something black. Something thick as oil and reeking of bitter sulfur. It surged, heaving itself outward, groaning with effort like it had a voice and Mina felt cold fingers walk up her spine. Dread settled in her chest and bleached her face until it matched her wheat colored hair. Beside her, Lewis's finger's sought her own and laced into them, tight and white-knuckled until she heard her bones pop but she did not notice the pain...did not register it beyond the disgust and the horror that turned her blood to ice.

"Goddess preserve us," she heard Lewis whisper as he took a step back and away from the wall that dripped that foul, bubbling substance.

But their grandmother, for all that it was worth, looked upon whatever it was as if it were some old fiend she'd known for ages. Even as it thickened, congealing into a mass that lengthened and stretched, growing spindly fingers that clawed and pulled like it was trying to birth itself through the very walls of their home. She did not look horrified like Lewis. She did not feel terror the way that Mina felt it, gripped around her heart like an icy vice.

Rhiannon Celmae looked angry. "Follow me," she ordered.

When neither of them moved, she grabbed Lewis by his collar. "Follow me, boy, or it won't be disease that kills you."

And so, like three small mice fleeing from a cat, they went running down into the dark, into the belly of the castle, hungry and cold, into rooms that Mina had never even known existed. Around them, walls split like bodies giving life to the oily black creatures that slithered out like wet snakes, writhing in a mess of pooling black scum. Sulfur mixed with blood, she noted.

Down they went, under the library, under the grand hall, under the dungeons until the walls turned to trembling earth and rocks shook beneath their feet...down until the torches sputtered out and then were reborn, glowing white and gold like molten metal...down until Mina thought she heard water under the cavernous shaking around them. For all of the threat, the walls didn't seem to break...as if raw destruction was not the motivator behind this quake. Af it...

Lewis gave voice to her terrifying thought. "It's...intelligent," he mumbled. He had always been the scholar of the two of them. With not much else to do, books had been his escape from his sick bed. She wondered if he'd known from the start or, if not, what it had been that had tipped him off.

Rhiannon snorted. "Because it's living, Lewis," she grumbled. 

Mina couldn't hear him over the wheezing in his chest, but the expression on his face in the otherworldly light was acidic.

"We need to move faster," Rhiannon insisted when the world around them gave another ugly, whimpering heave, as if it were trying to vomit something up. As if it were wretching those things right into the world, expelling evil like a sickness of the gut.

Moving faster, however, was out of the question. Not with Lewis limping along, turning bluer by the second. The air so deep seemed stale. Dead. Nothing living entered this place, Mina thought to herself. It was like standing in a tomb...like watching them slide her mother and father into their stone boxes again...like the palace so high above them sought to bury them in their premature graves.

The long, twisting hallway that they had followed down, down, down into the very guts of the ground, opened up suddenly, starkly, into a wide, round room paved in mottled, mossy cobblestones. The ceiling high above them split in a few slim places, casting beams of radiant light into the cavernous pit and, more importantly, onto the clear, cold pool of water resting in a silver basin the size of a round tub. It shone reflectively, brilliantly, and standing at the head of it was a single, simple weapon rack, roughly hewn of soft wood. A sword rested in it, innocently enough, the crossguard worn from age but clearly well maintained.

"I'm going to wake up any second now," Mina finally heard her own voice. "This will all just be a terrible, bizarre nightmare. I'll go tell Lewis about it. Everything will be just fine."

"Stop prattling, girl," Rhiannon barked, watery blue eyes narrowed at Mina with alarming scrutiny. "If you think it's bizarre, you're about to wet your dress."

Beside her, Lewis sank toward the floor, leaning heavily on her legs. Her fingertips brushed the top of his head, curls damp from labored breathing. "If you're about to do something to stop the apocolypse from happening above us, I suggest you do it quickly," he heaved. 

Rhiannon glared again, but she needn't have done anything. From the ceiling, one single, hideous drop of viscous, black horror dropped down, down, down (just like they had in their flight) toward the pool and it landed with a crystalline sound, clear and high like the note of a soprano.

And something below it, something under the water, under the basin, something living...answered.

The silver parted like it, itself, was fluid and, like the black slime that seeped and bled from the walls upstairs and the ceiling down here, it heaved forward and something...no, Mina realized with growing terror, her fingers again on her heirloom, someone was dragging themselves up through the water like they were swimming from the bottom of a deep, dark lake.

Fingers clawed, scrabbling for the end of the pool, but unlike the terrible substance that the ground gave forth, this silver peeled back and revealed not more of itself but human flesh.

Scarred hands, black sleeves, nails digging into the dirt between the cobbles for purchase when it finally scrambled over the edge...a face.

A man.

Hardly, Mina thought. A boy with hair as dark as the stuff that crept from the cracks in the earth and skin as pale as porcelain. 

Lewis scuttled backward, stumbling to his feet, hauling Mina with him in a retreat toward the door they'd entered from but this creature...this boy...he didn't move slow like the blackened arms that stretched from the walls and heaved their bodies forward upstairs. His joints weren't bent wrong. He didn't falter. Didn't hesitate.

He pulled himself upright as if he'd only been asleep, gasping for air with the water clear from his mouth and his nose, eyes wide--hazel, Mina thought. Chocolate and moss.

"He's human," she said softly, prying her fingers free from Lewis to take a careful, hesitant step forward.

As if he heard only her voice, the youth's focus turned, razor sharp, to her. "Rhiannon," he snarled, advancing on her like he intended to do real harm and Mina fled backward, careening into Lewis. "What the fuck did you do to me?"

But then he froze. Froze like he noticed the differences in her face. She looked like her grandmother had, yes, but they were not identical. Mina had her mother's face, heart-shaped, round cheeks. Her hair was lighter than her grandmother's. She was taller, though not by much. His eyes went to the heirloom clutched in her fingers. "You're not Rhiannon," he finally said the words as if he had difficulty computing them, stumbling over the syllables like he only just realized he had been asleep under the ground, underwater, under a sheening sheet of liquid silver, until barely a minute ago. "But you're wearing the Heart."

"Brysan." Mina heard her grandmother's quiet voice ache with something close to grief when she said the name. The boy turned slowly, soaking wet, pushing dark hair from his eyes. He opened his mouth like he was intent on speaking but the ground beneath them trembled again. The ceiling above split with a crack like lightning, opening up a cavernous maw like it would swallow them all, even their otherworldly newcomer with his too-bright eyes, lit up from within by a glow that Mina only noticed now that the light hit him.

Lewis whispered. "That is not human."

"Give me the Heart," the boy, Brysan, ordered. He didn't turn. He didn't look anywhere but at their grandmother, his hand extended back. Nobody moved. "The necklace, not-Rhiannon. Fucking now if you don't want to die in the next few minutes. Goddesses save me." Still, nobody move. Mina willed her legs to do it. She wished for it. She told her brain to tell her feet to move, to tell her hands to pull the necklace off. Nothing happened.

Brysan turned, his eyes narrowed and his expression so sharp he could have cut someone with it. He seized the sword from the rack with his left hand, handling it with ease, like it had been weighted specifically for him, and then he reached out and grasped the heirloom at her throat. "Apologies, m'lady," he said roughly and then he jerked down. The stone came loose of the clasp, held still in his palm.

For a moment, there was nothing. Just Brysan, looking as angry as a wet cat, holding that blade and that stone.

Then the earth roared as if it had been slit open. It shrieked around them, bellowing in rage. The whole room shook with increasing violence. Mina swore...no, she knew. She heard something. Something intelligent beneath the screaming. Something sentient crying out in agony, wailing, 'No!' as if something had just ripped the very heart out of it.

"That's right, you son of a bitch," Brysan whispered, his fingers tightening around the stone. 

It was then that, to Mina, the world exploded.

**Author's Note:**

> Credit for Lewis's name goes to Siobhan, who helps me sort out my all-too-bizarre dreams in the earliest hours of the morning.
> 
> Additionally, I'll be editing and adding tags as I progress. I'm not 100% sure where everyone's personality is going to take me quite yet.


End file.
